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Martin Amis says: Stalinbad

  
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
18:01 / 31.08.02
...And it's a good thing he did, too, because as a left-wing British person I had no idea there was ever anything wrong with Stalin, or the Soviet Union in general. I needed Martin Amis to tell me.

Amis' new book is called Koba The Dread and you can read an extract from it here. I can't quite figure out whether it's meant to be a serious historical work, a sort of a sequel to his memoir Experience (if the extract is anything to go by, there's an awful lot of smug reminiscing about Amis' time as a young 'man of letters' at the New Statesman), or just an excuse to give the namby-pambyn lefty liberals another kicking. Don't get me wrong: I do think there's value in examining Stalinist terror and why it has failed to gain the same kind of notoriety or cultural impact that the Holocaust has achieved. I just don't think that Amis is the man for the job. In that extract alone he demonstrates the kind of bizarre logic at work here: Christopher Hitchens was an apologists for Soviet crimes in the lates Seventies, therefore all lefties are a bunch of credulous masochistic anti-American ideologues (although Amis implies Hitchens is much more sensible now, what with the Bush-cum dribbling down his chin). And even I'm surprised by the open contempt Amis demonstrates for the working class, and the implication that Thatcherism cured the nation's ills, demonstrated here:

The novelist John Braine... used to say to left-wingers: "Why do you love despotism? Why do you yearn for tyranny?" And this was more or less the question I put to the Hitch:

"Rule by yobs. That's what you want. Why?"

"Yup. Rule by yobs. What I want is the berks in the saddle. Rule by yobs."

These exchanges took place in a spirit of humourous mutual appraisal. We were not quite yet the best friends we would become, and politics was part of the distance between us. Rule by yobs, incidentally, or the dictatorship of the proletariat (an outcome only academically entertained by the Bolsheviks) provided the flavour of the superficial and temporary rearrangement taking place in England then: the transfer of wealth, as the Labour party put it, to the working classes and their families. I was partly going with the culture, perhaps, but this idea (with 99% income tax in the top bracket, etc.) so little offended me that I too supported the continuation of Labour policies at the 1978 general election. Meanwhile, the social effect of trade union - they used to say trades-union - ascendancy was everywhere apparent. And profound and retroactive. It made me believe that the people of these islands had always hated each other. And this isn't true. The hatred, the universal disobligingness, was a political deformation, and it didn't last.

(Really not a big shock to find that Amis now has big problems with the idea of redistributing wealth - I'm more shocked by the idea that he was ever "little offended" by it - %possibly due to youthgul naivity which he has now outgrown%?)

But what do people think so far - is anyone looking forward to this, does anyone think it will be worth reading?
 
 
Bill Posters
13:44 / 10.10.02
Some might suggest that the fact it's taken 2 months for this thread to get one reply is good evidence for Amis' argument. As is the reduction / misrepresentation of his stance in the topic abstract. I don't think he's saying "all left-wing people are stupid", quite. It's a mite more subtle whatever one thinks of it.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
17:56 / 10.10.02
I think the fact that no-one originally responded to this thread doesn't prove much other than if you start a thread in Books, leave it ages and then move it to the Switchboard, it will pass completely under people's radar.

Moreover, the topic abstract may be a bit of a distortion/reduction, but is it really that much of a stretch from "If lefties were capable of objectivity this issue would have been faced years ago", which is how you yourself described the message to be taken from Amis' book?

Anyway, I'm aware that the first post isn't the most cogent I've ever written. Here's a couple more specific complaints (I've got other, but I'll have to come back later).

- Amis omits to mention that there has been a tradition of left-wing opposition to the Soviet Union pretty much from day one. This is largely a consequence of the fact that the book isn't really about the left's attitude towards the Soviet Union at all, it's about the attitudes of Christopher Hitchens and Kingsley Amis. The former has now joined Amis as an apologist for US imperialism; the latter also ended up as an ultra-conservative. But Amis, tellingly, sees Hitchens' recent shift as a comforting improvement, and specifically regards the 'New Left' (anti-capitalists, anti-war protestors etc) as being part of a tradition of worthless, knee-jerk protest... However, Amis doesn't give the impression that he's troubled himself with paying closer attention to current radical movements than flipping through the Evening Standard, and this is in fact symptomatic of his attitudes generally.

- Amis also omits to balance the book by pointing out, for example, that if the left (and what is this monolithic entity 'the left'?) have sometimes be guilty of ignoring atrocities committed in the USSR, how much more guilty have 'apolitical' people like himself (and he takes great pride in his supposed apoliticism, his supposed lack of ideology) been in ignoring atrocities committed or supported by the governments under whom they live? Amis seems incapable of entertaining the idea that he is free from ideology himself... Which is unsurprising - adhering to the dominant doctrines of the day is a very easy thing to disguise as impartiality... It's no coincidence that Amis is a very privileged man, who has benefited greatly from an accident of birth; not that he is a man who makes no attempt to hide how he feels about feminism, the working class, or efforts to combat discrimination in any form (aka 'political correctness', which Amis links in with those dirty Islamists here, you may be interested to note).

More later.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
22:15 / 10.10.02
Bjacques, NOT CHAIRMAN MAOMINSTOAT, but can't figure out how to change user right now:

I've read the excerpt and the exchange of letters between Amis and Hitchens. Of course it's worth reminding the world about what a bastard Stalin was, but I doubt it's much of a stick with which one can beat the Left any more, at least the Left that actually does anything. Today's oppositional groups still qualify as "the Left" but have pretty much moved away from Marxism and Leninism, much less Stalinism (except maybe the Shitty White People) and toward more practical matters. The general feeling is that groups are entitled to their ideologies but shouldn't expect other groups to take them very seriously.

Amis's demand that his erstwhile comrades of the Left help him exorcise his own early naivete are about as relevant as your parents stil larguing over whether Germaine Greer has become an essentialist in her old age (yes, and she dismisses the transgendered, but who cares?).
 
  
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